A ‘war’ effort to build homes will need more than a mere catalogue

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The deepening housing crisis has prompted Canada’s federal government to invoke wartime rhetoric, borrowing building strategies from a bygone era deployed to house returning Second World War veterans, but perhaps too much has changed over the past 80 years to suggest that the construction blueprints of the past can deliver today.

Housing Minister Sean Fraser recently announced the federal government will release a catalogue of pre-approved building designs and blueprints for builders to speed up the construction process. In doing so, he’s borrowing an 80-year-old leaf from post-war construction efforts that mass-produced housing for war-weary veterans returning from a war in Europe that left them financially and physically broke. Many of those post-war constructed homes are still standing, but are increasingly being converted to or replaced by newer and larger dwellings.